@TSJ I am also willing to spend my free time on some SR3 coding if you are also interested. Contact me through IRC, GTalk/Hangouts (my e-mail address is on my profile or drop me a PM if you can't see it). I also have Skype, Facebook, etc. if you're interested. This way we could have a short discussion session about plans and such. :-)

and yeah i guess that makes sense to experiment with some of that and to pull in existing sr3 models.

Pulling in the existing SR3 models is not a trivial task as those are in a custom SR3 format and none of the existing engines (including Irrlicht) have a loader for them, meaning that the first task is to write a loader for those .aux files if you want to use them.